The Iron Swamp

by J V Wordsworth

  We clinked glasses as I reflected that even surrounded by music I'd said that pretty loud. I downed the beer in one semi-smooth motion and dumped the glass upside down on the table. "Next one?"

  The key to drinking competitions was staying ahead. As such, my immediate desire to vomit could be seen as an advantage. I could sit back and wait for...

  I watched in horror as Becky downed her drink as well. "No one told me this was a downing competition," she said, placing the upside down glass next to mine.

  I hesitated, unsure of how to respond before rising unsteadily to my feet. "I'll get us the next two."

  But she was already grabbing me by the arm. "How about we go back to my place instead?"

  I wavered slightly in my ability to stand. I was pretty sure the right answer was no. That an upstanding individual might look at the beautiful, highly intoxicated person in front of him, and say no.

  "Yes."

  Still, I wasn't sure I should.

  "Definitely."

  She pointed at Sikes, the words taking a moment to come to her. "We'll need to drop him off first."

  His back rose noticeably in the deep breaths of an alcohol induced coma, and he didn't respond favorably to being woken. He nearly keeled over in an attempt to lean on me that badly overestimated my height, but I managed to keep him up until Becky had his arm over her shoulder.

  I lost them on the dance floor, drowned in the sweaty dancing bodies of what seemed like hundreds of people knocking me around. One of them tried to pick me up but mistimed it, and I shuffled away, getting tangled in someone else's skirt which was also plainly some sort of net trap.

  Come back to mine had to mean sex. In the back of my mind there were problems with sleeping with people who worked for you, but they probably didn't apply here – whatever they were. The last time I had sex, the Bronn Wastes were probably still part of the Drys. It was going to be a low moment if come back to mine meant a cup of jaffee and a cookie.

  Sikes threw up in my slider making the whole place smell like beer with a tang of stomach acid. He tried to say something, but Esperundi had long since departed his lexicon. Instead, he managed a sequence of vowels followed by a bit of dribble before he rid himself of the rest of his stomach. Momentarily, the stench was too horrible even to think about the woman in front of me.

  We helped Sikes out of the slider back to his house. Perhaps he tried to ask us if we wanted to come in for a drink, but neither of us understood him well enough to respond. Becky placed him on his sofa and went to get him a bucket and a glass of water from the kitchen. Sikes had committed the principle drinking error of getting too drunk to take the hangover pill, which made him as stupid as the people who used to drink before it was invented.

  *

  Becky dragged me back to the slider faster than I was comfortable moving, but it was she who first stumbled on the icy ground. As she was unwilling to let go of me, I came crashing down after her.

  Like most gardens in The Kaerosh, Sikes' lawn was basically a miniature swamp. There was a bit of lawn behind us that we'd managed to successfully navigate, but the grass thinned and disappeared into the pit of frosty mud where we now rolled.

  I was cold, shivering even, but not cold enough to care. My hand slipped as I tried to pull myself up, and I went catapulting backwards into the mud, smacking my head on an icy bit. Becky jumped on me giggling, staring through me with brown eyes camouflaged by mud. She was beautiful even when she was caked in it.

  "I thought you saw me as a brother?" I said, before I knew I was thinking it.

  She rubbed her hands on my chest, pulling the muddy shirt away from my skin. "Not a brother, more of a boyfriend." She picked me up, and we got back in the slider, stepping over Sikes' parting gift. "I don't normally go for long term things."

  "I don't normally go for any things," I said, though if my meaning was clear to her, it wasn't to me.

  She laughed, scrunching my attempt at chest hair in her fingers. "You're ok you know, Simon. You think you're a bad person but you're not."

  I stopped for a moment, not so drunk I couldn't see that she was telling me she cared. "My parents were good people. You're a good person. What I am..."

  I didn't know what I was. I didn't think I was a bad person. It was probably the booze, but I couldn't help the feeling that the defining moments of my character were still to be decided.

  Becky shook her head so fast that she slapped herself in the face with her hair. "You're smart Simon. You're wise." She kissed me. "You're..." She kissed me again. "Short."

  She laughed, and I joined in. I threw myself on the seat, smearing mud everywhere as I ordered the heating ramped up to maximum and we both began to strip. Becky's pink flesh beneath her mud covered face was beauty enough for any man, but as her breasts appeared from beneath her bra the rest of Cos seemed to vanish.

  As her pants slipped off, I grabbed her and pushed her back onto the chair. Finding some hidden strength, I held her in the air long enough to lie her on her back, and began to struggle with my trousers.

  Wars have lasted less time than it took to get my belt undone.

  I stopped grabbing her buttock with one hand and backed away slightly so the ceiling light could reveal whatever glue or knot was preventing it from coming undone. The heater blasted warm air against my back as I finally solved it, though I was still unable to get my trousers over my shoes. Naked as I was going to get, I waddled forward.

  *

  Lying on my face with a patch of drool under my cheek, my throat was lined with sandpaper, and my head was a throbbing vacuum. I didn't remember anything past Sikes buying us something called a gut fracker, but that did not dispel my certainty that I had not taken the hangover pill.

  I turned over to see Becky's face, still asleep, one naked breast above the cover line glaring at me like a police siren.

  Dis!

  For a moment I was too confounded to do anything but stare. Of all the ways I pictured seeing her naked body for the first time this was not one of them. Though presumably it wasn't the first time either.

  I was bursting for the toilet, but I was not about to wake her. This wasn't even in my apartment. I appeared to be in a ground floor single room flat with a kitchenette and bed all in a single room. A door the other side of the sofa lay open, the nose of the toilet beckoning me to get up.

  I looked around for some of my clothes, preferring to confront Becky dressed rather than naked. Unfortunately, Becky was not in the habit of picking up her clothes, and if mine were to be found amid the piles of laundry, I couldn't see them.

  Becky stirred, staring at me for a few clicks through one eye. "Guess we got pretty drunk last night then." She sat up, the cover falling off her other breast and resting in her lap, sending inappropriate impulses through my brain and body.

  "I...err...don't remember."

  She grinned. "Me neither." Tucking the cover around herself, she lent over the bed and picked up a pair of pants.

  I looked away, taking the time to search for anything I could put on my own body.

  "Simon," she said.

  I looked back.

  "Why have you got mud all over your face?"

  I ran a finger along my cheek, but nothing came off.

  Becky laughed. "The other one."

  This time I pulled off a piece of crusted mud that had no place being on my face. "Interesting." My hair felt as if someone had gelled it into a spike.

  Becky threw back the covers and dropped onto the floor. "Guess we better find you some clothes."

  "Or we could talk about what happened last night."

  She looked round, her good humor vanishing.

  "I didn't mean to take advantage of you last night," I said.

  She smiled at me sadly before walking to her closet and fishing out a bra from the mishmash of items that lay unfolded on each layer. "I'm 21, Simon, you didn't take advantage of me. I doubt very much you orchestrated last night's events, though even if you did, I don't mind
. But for now at least I'm not looking for a relationship."

  Every layer of armor I had shattered. Unable to hide my misery, my face morphed into a grotesque frown. It was only then I realized my foolish hope that last night might have resulted from her feeling the same way I did.

  "It's not that I don't like you, I feel more strongly for you than I've ever done for anyone. It would just be too complicated."

  I nodded, though I didn't believe her. The masochist in me wanted to force her to admit she felt nothing for me, but I stayed my words.

  She handed me a man's rib vest, beige dry-top, and trousers of a more ambiguous attire. "These should get you back home to change."

  I put the items on under the covers and joined her on the piles of clothes that covered her floor. The trousers dropped down around my waist, but the rib vest was so long it looked like a nightie. She smirked at me. "We're ok, aren't we?"

  I nodded, the arteries in my head filled with miniature hammers. "It never happened. Now let's get to work."

  I paused in the doorway of the bathroom unable to enter despite my rupturing bladder. Becky tried to cut in front of me only to stop next to me in equal horror. "What did we do?"

  The entire wall around the shower area was brown with mud. Hand prints ran up further than I could reach, and a mud-stained towel had seeped brown gunge into the mat on the floor.

  Becky took one step into the room moving her eyes from ruined object to ruined object. "Were we in a swamp last night?"

  "I'll pay for someone to clean it," I said, at a loss for anything else.

  Becky said nothing.

  "Come on, we need to get to work. Even Sikes might beat us in at this rate." I vaguely recalled that Sikes was worse off than we were, at least at the point of my last memory.

  After we had both used the toilet, and I hadn't bothered to wash my hands, I called my slider and waited for it to pull up. The mud stains on the door were not comforting, but when I opened it the stench of puke was like a punch in the throat. The seats were more brown than black, muddy rags littered the floor, and a branch on the far seat gave credence to the idea we'd been in a swamp. I stood looking into my ruined slider for twenty clicks before Becky put her hand on my shoulder and suggested a taxi.

  In the analysis that followed, I concluded that the only thing worse than adding taxi fare to the already extortionate costs of getting my slider and Becky's bathroom cleaned, was getting into that slider and going to work.

  The taxi dropped me off at Elvedeer first, and Becky waited while I took the elevator up to my apartment and grabbed some clothes. I slapped a few things in a bag as the meter was still running and came back again.

  At the station, I swiped my tablet on the taxi pad, and it let us out with a level of cheer only attainable by mindless robots. "Have a good day, sir."

  Hayson had given me and Sikes our own office on the fourth floor since I solved the case, and the two of us sneaked into it avoiding eye contact with everyone in the various cubicles. Sikes came in right behind us, looking almost as scruffy. "Where have you two been? My uncle wants to talk to us."

  I slumped into my chair and let my head fall onto the desk. "I'm never drinking again."

  "Come on, Boss," Becky had reverted to using my former title, possibly for the benefit of Sikes. "Hayson's waiting."

  I was in no state to philosophize over the meanings behind the usage of different names, so I began struggling to change my clothes.

  Sikes was watching me with fascination. "You didn't take the hangover pill last night did you, sir?"

  "Shut up, Wally."

  He smiled, looking at Becky who'd collapsed in the other corner. "Guess you two can't take your alcohol like I can."

  From what little memory I had of last night that sounded wrong, but the huge pile of vomit in my slider was hard to argue with.

  Hayson was on his weights when we entered, his dry-top hanging on the side of his chair. "Nidess, gracing us with your presence, how generous of you." He gave me no time to apologize. "When I agreed not to publicize that we knew the killer's identity, it was because you told me that you could catch her within a month, before the SP even knew about her. The idea was attractive enough even to lie to the President, but it is now almost a month down the line, and I can't help but notice that my cells are still short one mutant murderer."

  Caring about their jobs was something that people without splitting headaches and sliders full of puke did. I was in no state to argue. "We got a major break last night, Commissioner–"

  Hayson interrupted. "Sikes has already told me about your big break. So you found another pedophile who knew Kenrey; what of it?"

  "The–"

  "I see no link between your big break and our little monstrosity," he continued. "We aren't trying to solve the case of the child rapists are we, Nidess? Because if I find out you're playing me just to show up the President then you won't live long enough to learn your own stupidity."

  I nodded, pressing the pain out of my temples. "You have my assurances I'm not that stupid. The best way to find this girl without a widespread search that would tip off the SP is to find out who she is. I could search all the databases of malformed children matching ones to the security images, but even if she's in there, that could take a while. It will be faster to cross-reference events involving mutant girls with Kenrey's locations, and the most obvious link between Colson and Kenrey is the pedophilia."

  Hayson cleared his throat. "You don't think she'll be in our databases?" He didn't suggest using the security cameras. It did not benefit the police to plaster The Kaerosh in CCTV because the activities of the nation's law enforcement were often more nefarious than those of its criminals. We could still access the cameras owned by private companies and individuals, and perhaps stood a reasonable chance of finding her, but not without informing the SP. This had to be done quietly, through our own materials or not at all.

  "If she's in them," I said, "then the picture will be at least a decade distant, and with a face like that, who knows how much it's changed? Also she deleted her file at the compound, so the only images we have to go on are the grainy ones from the security footage."

  Hayson's tongue pushed against the front of his mouth as if he were a bull cat about to run me down. "Then we'll never find her. We should just tell Clazran we know the killer before the SP convince him it's Benrick."

  Even with the herd of animals stampeding across my brain, I had to object. "If we let the SP know who we are looking for then they will usurp the case and take all the glory. Benrick isn't responsible, and Liegon carries enough weight to slow their investigation until I've found the girl. And what we found yesterday will be immeasurably helpful to that end. We not only have a man at Kenrey's funeral who orders the same girls that Kenrey did, but by going through window security channels I found out that Kenrey and this guy, Deson, used to travel together. Looking for incidents involving deformed girls in every city, town, and village over the last 20 cycles of Kenrey's life could still take a while, but now I can look more closely at the times he is co-localized with Deson, considerably reducing the search time."

  "And if Deson was not around at the event that links Kenrey and Colson, what is our next move then?"

  Yesterday I had multiple answers to this question, but now all of them evaded me. "I'm still cross-referencing Kenrey with girls of the right age by location, and we are using the network security system to check for her current location. Hopefully, her distinctive features will allow us to track her. Also, I'm looking for other men who repeatedly associate with Kenrey and Deson so I can use them in the same way as Deson." I had already found a group of suspicious names who repeatedly used to travel with Kenrey and Deson, but Hayson was not in the mood to hear it. "The key to this case is refining the search algorithm until it gives us Colson's true identity."

  Hayson paused as dreams of presenting Colson to Clazran battled in his mind with the torment of the SP charging Benrick and leaving us with nothing.
"You have one month, and if I can't put my boot on her face by then, I'm going to do it to you instead."

  It wasn't about glory or reward for me. The PI I employed to investigate Pressen had found nothing, and I hadn't heard anything from Eschea since she was in my apartment. It had been a long time since Pressen waited for me outside Elvedeer, and for all I knew he had everything he needed to walk me up Blay Square. Finding Colson was my ticket into the SP where I would be safer. Only the most foolish journalists went against the SP.

  Momentarily, I considered asking Hayson for help. A police commissioner might be able to frighten Pressen into silence. But Hayson was not a trustworthy ally. He was as likely to help Pressen acquire the stolen evidence as stop him. No one could be trusted with the information Pressen held.

  Sikes shut the door behind us. "In a month he'll be giving us another month. He's desperate to be the one who catches her, and the SP are on totally the wrong track."

  "Let's hope we won't need it," I said as we walked back across the open offices to our door. "Did you look into these guys who've been traveling with our pair of pedophiles?"

  "Deson and a few others are pretty important. A couple of them own big businesses with thousands of employees, but just as many of them are nobodies."

  Sinking into my chair, I rubbed my forehead in a doomed attempt to stop the pain. By lunchtime standing was still too much effort, so I skipped food, instead flicking through file after file of atrocities befalling severely deformed girls that occurred close to Kenrey's location. I only searched the mainstream news sites where the articles were well classified and the sources reliable, but there were still hundreds of them. When I set the machine away the night before, I reasoned there couldn't be many people with faces like mountain ranges, but while this might not have been wrong, it meant a high proportion of them were mistreated. Not one of them fit the profile though, and with the exception of a few young ones who might have changed a lot as they grew up, many of them could be discarded from the accompanying pictures.

  Other than to go to the toilet, Sikes was the only one to leave the room all day. He came back in at R:10 and unloaded an armful of snacks onto the table, the sound of them hitting the wood like rain on parched earth. I grabbed a packet of crispies, too hungry to even express gratitude. Becky had not looked away from her network screen once since we'd divvied up the news articles, so I expected to have to race her for the greasier foods, but her eyes were glued to what she was reading.